For hotel chains, it becomes highly challenging to manage and optimize the whole process of reservations manually. In this article, we will quickly walk you through how a Central Reservation Office (CRO) can help you efficiently handle this process with much-needed centralized control.
Let’s say you run a hotel chain with ten properties across ten locations. A guest calls up the central office to make a booking at Property 3 in location Y. In a typical scenario, your reservation/call center agent would have to check with Property 3 to determine the availability as per the guest requirement, right? Now, isn’t it a time-consuming process that could lead to lost booking opportunities? This is where a CRO makes things a lot easier for you. Your reservation agent can look up the CRO to know the availability and rates. Finally, if the guest says “yes,” the agent can immediately process and confirm the booking.
How does a Central Reservation Office (CRO) work?
It is a system that allows your chain hotel’s reservation agents to receive booking requests over the phone, email, or other sources to handle them immediately. It displays real-time room availability and rates of all your properties and thus assists you in finding or even suggesting the right property to the potential guest. You can say that a CRO helps group hotels like yours to distribute reservations across the entire chain.
Key features and benefits
Like any other hospitality technology solution available in the market, a CRO has a lot to contribute toward a profitable group hotel operation. You can easily manage reservations for single, group, travel agents, and corporate bookings, all in one place.
Here are a few reasons for a CRO to be an operationally imperative tool for your hotel chain.
- Single dashboard: View real-time availability across all the properties in your group. Manage and monitor bookings/reservations from a single dashboard.
- Itinerary booking: Manage booking for itineraries; book multiple rooms for several guests in various room types across all your properties. You can do it for different check-in dates, too.
- Centralized guest profile management: A powerful and smart CRO also acts as a customer relationship management tool. It captures crucial guest data, including reservation history and preferences. This helps you propose the right offering when you get a request from a returning guest. You can also configure and run email campaigns based on the customer data you have.
- Efficient quotation management & proposal creation: The CRO notifies you when it receives a guest request, ensuring that your agents don’t miss out on any of them. As a result, you can respond to each of them. Such promptness in your reply makes your audience happy.
- Minimize mistake: All the quotations are created automatically based on the real-time availability and rates populated in the central reservation system. This is a great way to minimize overbooking and double booking while avoiding incorrect pricing.
- Create and send quotations, follow-up, and confirm: It allows you to block rooms, create and send quotations to your guests with room details, pricing, and booking/cancellation policy, etc. As the CRO allows you to have clarity on quotations that are about to expire, you can have it set up to send out automated follow-up emails.
- Flexible payments and deposits: You can customize payment terms or enforce policy-driven deposits to manage bookings/cancellations/no-shows. Also, accept advance deposits from guests on behalf of the property for which the booking is created.
- Control user rights: Control your reservation agents’ access rights appropriately from the CRO interface. You can also see who did what and when to a booking.
- Offer discounts: Apply discounts to the base rate when creating a reservation and increase the chances of booking conversion.
- Enhance branding: Integrate your brand’s logo and other critical branding elements in your email templates. It works well for your chain hotel’s branding.
Hotelogix can help you with this
Hotelogix’s all-in-one cloud-based Hotel PMS comes with an integrated CRO to assist multi-property/chain hotel owners like you in managing reservation requests from the central office. It allows your hotel chain’s reservation agents to receive reservation/booking requests coming via phone, mail, brand website, travel agents, corporate clients, and walk-ins, etc.
